Israeli super spy and assassin Gabriel Allon and his daredevil cohorts are back in Daniel Silva’s new book The Secret Servant.

Allon and his team delighted us in The Messenger, a gripping and often chilling account of an assassination plot against the holiest of holy men – the Pope – right in the Vatican City.

So it was with a great deal of anticipation that we picked up The Secret Servant.

Alas, The Secret Servant is not half as gripping a tale as The Messenger.

As with the Messenger, the enemy in Secret Servant is the ruthless community of Islamic Jihadists.

But that’s where the similarities between the two books end.

Unlike the well drawnout and intricate plot in the The Messenger, the story in Secret Servant is a bit simplistic focusing mostly on the kidnap and rescue of the daughter of the American Ambassador to the United Kingdom.

The trail of locating Elizabeth Halton takes our ruthless agent Gabriel Allon from Israel to the U.K. to Netherlands to Denmark and back to U.K. In between, our peripatetic Allon makes forways to the U.S. (the CIA headquarters in Northern Virginia) and Israel.

In Denmark, Allon almost gets killed by Jihadis during the ransom payment to rescue Elizabeth. Makes him seem almost mortal!

Art expert Sarah Bancroft, who made her first appearance in Messenger,  reappears in Secret Servant but in a much smaller, and almost irrelevant, role.

Secret Servant reads like the writer was in too much of a hurry to flesh out the plot details the way he did it with mastery in The Messenger.